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Topic: Cold Skin (Read 88 times)

Directed by Xavier Gens from a screenplay written by Jesus Olmo and Eron Sheean, Cold Skin stars Ray Stevenson, Stephen Oakes and Aura Garrido. It's based on a novel by Spanish (Catalan) writer, and tells the story of meteorologist and IRA sympathiser (omitted in the film) who leaves on an annual assignment for a weather station on a remote island in 1914, to escape his past and the outbreak of WWI. The only other person there is a misanthropic lighthouse keeper, and the previous meteorologist apparently died of typhus. Yet, much worse things are to come, as it turns out the waters off the island are teeming with hostile fishmen. He's in a desperate battle for survival, where it's at times unclear who the real enemy is.

I can only find Russian and Spanish trailers, so here are some posters.

So, I liked this a lot, as you can probably tell by the fact I made the thread in the first place. In fact, I would say that for all the flaws it has, I liked it more than either Dunkirk or Blade Runner 2049. Yes, I would rather it had some longer, better dialogues exploring more angles of the story alongside the action and the visuals, (though same goes for those two as well).

Still, it's exactly the kind of a "mid-range" movie Hollywood does so rarely now, which has a lot of pretty good CGI creatures and plenty of battle scenes, yet is ultimately a story about three characters stuck at a single location. It has some parallels to Omega Man, though whereas that one had heavy Christian symbolism, this one is pure Nietsche (opening with the abyss quote everyone knows so well) by the way of Heart of Darkness. Those who saw Cloverfield Lane 10 (probably everyone here but me) will probably see parallels to that, too. It's rated 16+ in Russia, but that still allows for decent amount of gore and brutality, too.

On another unrelated note, what do you think of Andrey Zvyagintsev's movies? I ask this mostly because his film Loveless is apparently a big contender this year for the Best Foreign Film category, and Leviathan was also nominated for an Oscar a couple years back.

Sounds like an interesting premise. After Russian Guardians, my experiences with 2017 Russian cinema can only go up (also, for reference, was that an original screenplay or did the characters exist previously)?

On another unrelated note, what do you think of Andrey Zvyagintsev's movies? I ask this mostly because his film Loveless is apparently a big contender this year for the Best Foreign Film category, and Leviathan was also nominated for an Oscar a couple years back.

Sorry, Kashmir, I appreciate the intent, but the bolded part is an extreme reading comrehension fail. I mention in the poll above that this is a Spanish/Catalan film, and the original post mentions that it's based on their novel. One of the perks of being here is that some European cinema reaches us a lot earlier. (Some Asian one theoretically does as well, but that only seems to apply to VOD in my experience.)

As for the rest, Leviathan's nomination caused some highly predictable controversy here, but I barely had time to see anything back then. Loveless came out about half a year ago, and I am not sure whether it ever came to my local theaters. I know that the recent and similarly acclaimed hospital and relationship drama Arrythmia did not: there was some argument about whether it should have been nominated over Loveless. Sadly, the one movie of ours that's dominating all the cinemas right now is Kolovrat's Legend:

Earlier this year, there was also a bunch of trashy comedies whose titles I do not remember (one was like Nine Lives, except that instead of businessman -> cat it was FSB guy -> toddler), Salyut 7, which was apparently just a decent based-on-real-events space drama, and Matilda (about our last tsar's tryst with a world-famous ballerina), which only got attention due to walking anime Poklonskaya's attempts to ban it for "besmirching the holy martyr's reputation", before being described as utter shit by basically everyone. (There was a ton of reviews beginning with "I want to defend free speech, but why do I have to defend THIS?). By the end of the year, there'll be another drama about a Soviet-era sports team and that's about it, I think.

EDIT: Forgot the movie about the reunification with Crimea, which apparently had 21% "Want to See" on the (real) Kinopoisk before there was some account hacking to raise it to 61%. Either way, it had some hilarious review blurbs.